Is dual citizenship under threat in the United States?
Many of you have asked me if you move to another country, do you have to give up your US citizenship? And until now, that hasn't been the case. You can live in another country and get permanent residency, or you can acquire another citizenship without giving up your US citizenship. But all of that might change because a senator from Ohio has proposed a bill to make it illegal for US citizens to hold more than one citizenship. This means that upwards of 40 million Americans could have to give up a citizenship that they have from another country or be forced to renounce their US citizenship.
Now, a lot of you have sent me messages about this new bill, and I've seen a lot of news about it. I have a slightly different perspective. So, I'm going to go through what's really happening here, some of the reasons that I think this bill was proposed, and if it has any realistic chance of getting through.
If we're just meeting for the first time, I can introduce myself. I've been helping people move abroad for the last 20 years, and I've been living and working in upwards of 65 countries since I was 20 years old. Well, I'm not going to mention the senator who proposed this bill because I personally think that he is doing it to get attention, so we'll leave him anonymous. But this bill is to establish that US citizens shall have sole and exclusive allegiance to the United States. The purpose of the bill is to protect the integrity of national citizenship, preserve allegiance to the United States, and it also mentions that it’s in the national interest of the United States to ensure that US citizenship is held exclusively, and that US citizens with foreign citizenship could create conflicts of interest or divided loyalties.
So, I think that the whole premise and purpose of this bill is invalid because the United States is a relatively young country. It's a country that is based on immigrants. It was founded on immigrants, and it's a very diverse country, and that's one of the things that makes the US so great. The notion that a couple hundred million people cannot pledge allegiance to our country if we hold citizenship from another country just doesn't even make sense. I mean, my grandparents’ family immigrated to the US from Europe. And I do believe that they renounced their citizenship eventually, but there’s no conflict of interest if I decide to go get citizenship from Italy, Hungary, or Romania.
I think that what this bill will do is actually create more division because you're forcing US citizens to choose between the US and another country. I've always said for the past 8 years that I never would want to give up my US citizenship, even though I love to travel and spend time in other countries, because I still love my country. My family lives here, and there would be no reason for me personally to give up my citizenship. But I think if I was forced into it and I had another passport, then I would strongly consider it. There could be upwards of 40 million US citizens that hold dual citizenship.
So, if 40 million people are forced to make that decision, first of all it would be an administrative nightmare, and second of all, it would just be impractical, and then it would cost the US a lot of money. Let's say that half of the 40 million people were forced to renounce their US citizenship, or as it says here, within a year, if they didn’t give up their citizenship, it would expire and it would just be automatic if they held citizenship in another country. We're not going to get into how they would even track that since there’s no current existing system to tell how many Americans are living abroad and how many people hold dual citizenship, because it’s never actually been an issue. It's never been a risk to this country.
But if they did, it would just create a huge administrative backlog of millions of people that need to renounce their citizenship within the next year or who decide to do that. And then all of those people, upon renouncing their citizenship, would no longer have to pay taxes to the United States. I talked about this recently in a call with my relocation clients, and everyone had a different perspective. They were bringing in news articles and videos that they found, and we were talking about this. A lot of my clients and I decided that this would be very unlikely because, if you have even a million people give up their US citizenship, that means that they would have to pay a fee to renounce and pay an exit tax, but they would no longer be beholden to the United States when it comes to paying taxes in the future.
If we look at the current numbers, only 5,000 people renounced their citizenship in the last year. So, this bill would actually encourage people and incentivize more people to renounce their citizenship. When we look at the numbers of people that renounce their citizenship, which is usually for tax reasons, it’s anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 people per year. According to one article, the capacity of the government currently to process these applications is about 5,000 people per year, and there’s a waiting list of 30,000 people who want to voluntarily renounce their citizenship right now.
So, I think that having potentially millions of people, or hundreds of thousands, renouncing their citizenship essentially overnight would just be an administrative disaster, and it would reduce the amount of tax revenue that the US government would receive in the future. There’s also constitutional precedent from a case that says citizenship cannot be taken away without an individual’s voluntary intentional act, and that Congress cannot redefine intent through deadlines. This type of bill would directly contradict those rulings. Now, we've seen decisions get overturned, so there is a possibility of that. But if the United States is about freedom, one of those freedoms should be the ability to hold citizenship in multiple countries, because as far as I know, this hasn't been an issue at any time before.
There's also millions of US citizens who are born in different countries around the world who have never even been to the United States, and they would also be forced to choose between a country that they hold a passport to that they've never been to, but they still have to pay and file taxes to, or living in their home country. Imagine if you were born in Spain to US parents and you've never been to the US, but you have dual citizenship. If this bill was enacted, then you’d have to decide between holding the passport of the country that you were born in and live in, or deciding to renounce your Spanish citizenship to become a US citizen.
Once we get through all of that, we look at the political support for this bill. There’s currently a legislative forecasting model that puts the probability of passing this bill at about 3%. So, it looks like there’s not a lot of bipartisan support for this, possibly because a lot of people in the US government might hold dual citizenship themselves. It shows here that Melania Trump and her son Baron also hold Slovenian citizenship in addition to US citizenship. Perhaps if many politicians and the president are individually affected by a bill like this, it would reduce their motivation to pass something like this as well.
But that doesn’t mean that we should relax about this bill because, even though it's a completely nonsensical bill that I think was proposed for individual interest and doesn't benefit the American people or the US in any tangible way, the issue here is that if this does get taken seriously, some version of this bill could be passed someday. Or it could set a precedent for another version of it to be passed. Maybe that’s not retroactive. Maybe people that already have dual citizenship could be grandfathered in, and new people who want to get citizenship wouldn’t be able to. So, I don’t think it’s something that we should not worry about. It's definitely something to take seriously, and crazier things have happened in US law, but I think it’s a shame that somebody would try to negatively affect tens of millions of Americans living in the US and abroad just for their own apparent personal interests and personal gain, and personal opinion, just because he decided to renounce his citizenship when he moved to the US.
If this type of bill does get passed, what does this mean for you? Well, if you would like to go live in another country someday and become a naturalized citizen of that country, which could take 5 or 10 years, or if you buy a passport in another country such as a golden passport, then you would need to make the decision of whether or not you want to keep your US citizenship. If you want to travel back to the US for family reasons, personal reasons, or leisure, or if you decide to live in another country for 10 years and then move back to your home country to retire and live the rest of your years there, you wouldn’t be able to. This could affect so many people in so many negative ways.
It could affect your ability to work in different countries, property rights, pension and savings, and if you qualify for a pension in multiple countries, whether you’ll ever be able to receive that in the future. Also, if you renounce your citizenship, you would no longer have to pay taxes, but you also cannot vote, and you’d have to get a visa to come back to the US in the future. So, this is really serious stuff. Polling shows that only a third of US citizens support the idea that US citizens should have to give up citizenship in other countries, and about half don’t think that naturalized citizens should have to give up their citizenship.
I think the most important thing to do here is to make your voice heard, to contact your local representatives, and ensure that they know you do not support this type of bill. I think that if it’s unanimously condemned and shut down by the majority of people, then hopefully we can kill this bill. But it’s still very disturbing that this type of thing would be proposed.
I personally am going to continue with my plan to get a second passport through Ancestry in Romania. I’m sure many of you watching either know someone or possibly yourself could qualify for citizenship by descent from a different country, especially in Europe. Many of my clients qualify for a passport through Italy or Ireland. For me, it’s Romania and Hungary. I think that’s a really important part of anyone’s cultural identity—to be able to reconnect with the countries your ancestors came from. Even if they moved abroad to the US to give you more opportunities and a better life, things come full circle. A lot has changed in the past 100 years, and you wouldn’t be alone if you wanted to go back to where your ancestors came from to reconnect with your culture and be able to live a better quality of life somewhere else that’s not available or only available at a much higher cost in the United States.
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